Vance Bourjaily, 87, novelist; explored post-WWII themes

He died after slipping into a coma following a fall several days earlier, said his wife, Yasmin Mogul.

Mr. Bourjaily never achieved the top rank of recognition that was predicted for him after publication of his first novel, “The End of My Life,’’ in 1947, and he figured prominently when critics made lists of writers who were underappreciated or whose promise had gone unfulfilled. But he had a long and substantial career in letters of the sort that was far more prevalent a half-century ago than it is today.

Not only a serious novelist, Mr. Bourjaily was also a teacher who spent more than two decades at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and five years at the University of Arizona before starting the creative writing program at Louisiana State University. He worked as a journalist and an editor. He wrote short stories, essays, and reviews. He was also a serious literary socialite.

“Everyone came to Bourjaily’s parties in the early 1950s,’’ Esquire magazine said about him in the 1980s, naming Mailer, Jones, William Styron, and others as attendees. At one party, Mr. Bourjaily introduced Jones to the actor Montgomery Clift, a pairing that would lead to one of Clift’s signature roles, the brooding bugler Prewitt in the film version of Jones’s novel “From Here to Eternity.’’

Mr. Bourjaily’s novels often explored what it meant to be an American at a particular historical moment. His second book, “The Hound of Earth’’ (1955), grounded in the Cold War, is about an Army scientist who has gone AWOL in guilt-ridden flight after contributing to the development of the atomic bomb. His third, “The Violated’’ (1958), a psychologically astute profile of four characters over 25 years — a period with World War II at its center — prompted the critic Irving Howe to write that Mr. Bourjaily was “one of the few serious young novelists who has tried to go directly toward the center of postwar experience.’’

His other books include “Confessions of a Spent Youth,’’ a picaresque, autobiographical tale largely about the war and sex; “The Man Who Knew Kennedy,’’ which tells of the decline into suicide of a young man who seemingly has everything, and which reflects Mr. Bourjaily’s view that the nation’s golden postwar years were curtailed by the assassination of the president in 1963; and “Brill Among the Ruins,’’ a Vietnam-era parable focusing on a middle-age Midwestern lawyer.

Mr. Bourjaily lived for a time in San Francisco, where he was a feature writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, and then moved to New York, site of the memorable parties. He wrote reviews of Broadway shows for a new publication, The Village Voice. He left the city for Iowa and the writers’ workshop in 1957.

Mr. Bourjaily was an avid outdoorsman, a jazz aficionado, and an amateur cornet player. (He bought his first instrument when he left the Army with his mustering-out pay.) His novel “The Great Fake Book’’ (1987) has an amateur jazz cornetist as a protagonist, and at Iowa he was known for organizing jam sessions (and parties and pig roasts) at his farm outside of Iowa City.

“Vance was a key member of the workshop,’’ Marvin Bell, a poet who was Mr. Bourjaily’s longtime colleague at the writers’ workshop, said in a telephone interview Thursday. “Not only for his teaching. For his socializing. There was a lot of socializing.’’

Mr. Bourjaily’s marriage to Bettina Yensen ended in divorce. Two of their children survive him: a daughter, Robin, of Des Moines, and a son, Philip, of Iowa City, an outdoors writer who collaborated with his father on a book, “Fishing by Mail: The Outdoor Life of a Father and Son.’’

In addition to his wife, a former student whom he married in 1985 and who lives in San Rafael, Calif., Mr. Bourjaily leaves their son, Omar; a brother, Paul Webb of Yellow Springs, Ohio; a stepdaughter, Raissa Williams of San Francisco; four grandchildren; and a stepgranddaughter.